Endegenous information quality A job-assignment application

SIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Strategic Experimentation with Exponential Bandits

We analyze a game of strategic experimentation with two-armed bandits whose risky arm might yield payoffs after exponentially distributed random times. Free-riding causes an inefficiently low level of experimentation in any equilibrium where the players use stationary Markovian strategies with beliefs as the state variable. We construct the unique symmetric Markovian equilibrium of the game, followed by various asymmetric ones. There is no equilibrium where all players use simple cut-off strategies. Equilibria where players switch finitely often between experimenting and free-riding all yield a similar pattern of information acquisition, greater efficiency being achieved when the players share the burden of experimentation more equitably. When players switch roles infinitely often, they can acquire an approximately efficient amount of information, but still at an inefficient rate. In terms of aggregate payoffs, all these asymmetric equilibria dominate the symmetric one wherever the latter prescribes simultaneous use of both arms. Copyright The Econometric Society 2005.

Contests with an unknown number of contestants

This paper studies rent-seeking contests where the contestants do not know the number of actively competing contestants. Two models are compared. In the first, all players are risk neutral; in the second, all have constant absolute risk aversion. If the expected fraction of active contestants is low, an increase in the number of potential contestants increases individual rent-seeking efforts. This effect is in contrast to the complete information case where individual rent-seeking efforts decrease in the number of contestants. The effect is more likely under risk neutrality, but also possible under risk aversion. Equilibrium rent seeking efforts are lower under risk aversion if and only if the expected fraction of active contestants is low. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, B.V. 2006Contest, Rent-seeking, Number uncertainty, Risk aversion,

Tullock contests of weakly heterogeneous players

I explore asymmetric equilibria in a Tullock contest of heterogeneous players in the case when the players’ heterogeneity is weak, and the effort optimization problem can be analyzed in the linear approximation. With increasing discriminatory power of the contest, players sequentially drop out. The corresponding threshold values of the discriminatory power are related to those identified earlier for a Tullock contest of identical players. Weak heterogeneity, however, is sufficient to make the players’ behavior strongly asymmetric and qualitatively alter the structure of the equilibria as compared to the homogeneous case. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Contests, Rent-seeking, Heterogeneous players,

Group contest success functions

Contest, Conflict, Axiom, Group, C70, D72, D74,